What Millennials Expect from Employee Communication—and How You Can Deliver It

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Millennials are representing more and more of today’s workforce and with them come new expectations of technology and communication in the workplace. However, are our employee communications shifting along with them?

According to Jeff Corbin, CEO of KCSA and APPrise Mobile, the answer is no. In the latest episode of CW Live, Natasha Nicholson talks with Corbin about the results of the 2015 Mobile Trends in the Workplace study and what they reveal about employee engagement and communication today.

A significant trend that the results show, Corbin shares, is the impact millennials are starting to have on employee communication. He says that there is somewhat of a disconnect happening right now in organizations: Millennials want instant, easy-to-access communication and content, but their employers are still predominately relying on older forms of communication.

“Current legacy systems (intranets, SharePoint systems) don’t work well in the mobile environment. Millennials aren’t able to get information quickly through these devices.”

Even email isn’t as effective as it once was due to problems of overload: The survey shows that though 89 percent of companies still rely on internal email, 30 percent of respondents ignore emails from their employers.

“Never before have we had such direct access to our employees…The question is, what to do about it?”—Jeff Corbin

Corbin suggests that communicators look at these trends as an opportunity to create a mobile strategy in their organizations.

“Never before have we had such direct access to our employees, to our other targeted audiences. The question is, what to do about it?”

The answer? Corbin recommends researching new methods of communication—like messaging apps and social collaboration tools—and start implementing them as soon as possible.

“Email isn’t going away anytime soon,” he says. However, because “millennials have these mobile devices and email is becoming somewhat of an issue, it might be a wake-up call for organizations and companies to start to think differently about how they communicate with their workers.”

Watch the complete interview below. To learn more about the 2015 Mobile Trends in the Workplace study, you can go to theEMPLOYEEapp’s website.

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Comments

While I agree with some of what Jeff is putting forward, I disagree with his assessment that intranets don’t “work well in a mobile environment.” With responsive design, native apps and web apps, there are a host of ways to repurpose content and other tools in your intranet for mobile delivery. The newer version of SharePoint is even pretty capable of delivering a passable mobile view.

In fact, the intranet can serve as the hub for a digital workplace where social, content, transactional tools all combine to serve the employee need to consume information and get work done wherever they are.

Moreover, this is not an issue unique to millennials. The need for mobile delivery has been around ever since we’ve had employees working in remote situations (away from desktop/laptop computers); since before there were computers. Employees working in such situations are finally leveraging benefits from the technology catching up to the need. It’s just been recently (past 5-7 years) that we’ve had the ability to deliver usable mobile access.

The two barriers I see that Jeff didn’t address are a lack of commitment to implement such integrated solutions and the complexity of making it all work well in a truly integrated user experience. The latter often discourages the former, leaving companies to get farther and farther behind.

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